1. Technical Field
This invention relates to multipoint publish/subscribe communications and, more particularly, to certified message delivery and queuing between multipoint computer-based publisher and subscriber applications.
2. Background
In a typical anonymous public/subscribe technologies—such as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,557,798; 5,339,392; 5,257,369 and 5,187,787—a publisher application publishes information to requesting or subscriber applications without having any knowledge of the number, identity or address of any such subscriber applications. In fact, no subscriber applications may exist. Instead of knowing about subscribers, a publisher will merely publish information applying a context or subject “label” to the published message. A subscriber then identifies desired messages by the content label and receives only those messages relevant to the desired content.
The advantages of such a publish/subscribe, content-based addressing systems are well known and include the ability to decouple subscribers and publishers from one another. This decoupling allows publishers and subscribers to operate without having any knowledge of the identity, location or address, or communication protocols of each other. The flexibility that this offers is enormous and, accordingly, such content/subject-based addressing communication-enviroments are becoming increasingly popular.
Unfortunately, the very advantages (such as anonymous decoupling) of these systems, precludes the use of conventional reliable messaging protocols such as TCP. TCP, and other reliable messaging protocols apply only in point-to-point type of communications. In these point-to-point communications message senders and receivers are directly linked to one another and therefore know each other's addresses and locations.
Unfortunately, these reliable messaging protocols—that guarantee arrival and order of arrival of messages—require advance knowledge between applications. They are, therefore, not applicable to typical publish/subscribe environments.
Yet, such reliable or certified delivery of messages is extremely important. For example, certified delivery is appropriate when a sending application requires individual confirmation of delivery for each message it sends. For example, a travelling sales representative computes sales figures on a lap-top computer, and sends them to a supervisor at the office. The user must know for certain that the data has arrived, and has been included in the supervisor's sales report.
Certified delivery is also appropriate when a receiving application cannot afford to miss any messages. For example, in an application that processes orders to buy and sell inventory items, each order is important. If any orders are omitted, then inventory records are incorrect.
In addition, certified delivery is appropriate when each message on a specific subject builds upon information in the previous message with that subject. For example, a sending program updates a receiving database, contributing part of the data in a record, but leaving other parts of the data unchanged. The database is correct only if all updates arrive in the order they are sent.
Furthermore, certified delivery is appropriate in situations of intermittent physical connectivity—such as discontinuous network connections, for example, an application in which several mobile lap-top computers must communicate with one another. Connectivity between mobile units is sporadic, requiring persistent storage of messages until the appropriate connections are reestablished.
Thus, a very real need exists for having both the advantages of certified messaging and the advantages of content-based, anonymous publish/subscribe environments.